2024-10-15
Opportunity Structures: Kitschelt identified “input” structures and “output” structures as key variables for shaping the trajectory of anti-nuclear movements.
Are there more dimensions to consider here?
| Charles Brockett | Hanspeter Kriesi | Dieter Rucht | Sidney Tarrow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access points | Institutional structures | Access to the party system | Openness of the polity |
| Elite fragmentation | Informal conflict resolution procedures | Actor-specific alliance structures | Stability of political alignments |
| Level of repression | Configuration of power regarding specific challengers | Actor-specific conflict structures | Elite divisions |
Kitschelt looks at diversity among a set western democracies, what changes when we extend the scope outside that region/set of regimes?
We need to simplify, but how much is too much?
Examples: Contemporary U.S., France, Germany etc.
Explicit or implicit legal protections for protest
Mechanisms for peaceful transitions or change in policy
Ability to effectively repress transgressive contention and reward compliance
Examples: Yemen, Burma
States may lack the capacity to repress effectively, but also they don’t offer concessions
Protests often evolve into civil war and revolutions
Examples: China, Hungary*, Iran
There’s an (imperfect) correlation between state capacity and democracy, so these are comparatively more rare
Contention happens, but it rarely threatens (and sometimes strengthens) the state.
…the actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, for the purpose of imposing a cost on the target as well as deterring specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions
- Davenport, Christian. “State repression and political order.” Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 10.1 (2007): 1-23.
Excludes more common “law enforcement” activities that don’t involve expressive activity
Excludes subtle (and sometimes deliberate) structural inequalities that can reduce protests, as well as positive incentives that could undermine protest (co-option)
Emphasizes “first amendment type rights” like freedom of speech, association, press etc.
All states use repression in response to threats! Democracies repress less (although there’s some debate about the shape of this relationship)
But they vary in terms of their willingness, ability to use it, the actions/groups they repress due to both state capacity and leader characteristics
“I no longer wanted to fight. At whom was I going to fire? At children and youths who did not completely realize what they were doing?” - Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (president of El Salvador from 1935 - 1944)
Quoted in: Brockett, Charles D.. Political Movements and Violence in Central America (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics) (p. 199). Cambridge University Press.
For leaders
Costs: loss of legitimacy, backlash, disruption
Constraints: inability to target protesters effectively, lack of competent/loyal police or military
Alternatives: co-opting protests or granting concessions
For protesters
How likely/how severe is the punishment? How important is my contribution?
Can I avoid consequences by staying home? Are there less dangerous alternatives to open dissent?
The impact of repression is wildly inconsistent: sometimes it discourages dissent, other times it causes more of it, or the relationship is contingent on timing.
The same kinds of extreme pressure appear to work in some circumstances, and backfire in others, or work briefly and then fail.
At their most extreme levels, repressive strategies might prompt backlash because they conclude there’s no real difference.
Let us not go as sheep to the slaughter! It is true that we are weak and defenceless, but resistance is the only reply to the enemy! Brothers! It is better to fall as free fighters, than to live by the grace of the murderers. Resist! To the last breath. (as cited in Shneidman, 2002, p. 4)
Rachel Einwohner finds that ghetto uprisings were most likely in Nazi Germany when residents were most hopeless.
January 1978 op-ed condemning Khomeini. Students/Clergy protests and the state uses live ammunition to disperse the crowd.
February 1978: protests break out in multiple cities during memorial services (pattern of protests every 40 days ensues)
February - August, 1978: Shah makes multiple concessions to protest leaders
August 19, 1979: Cinema Rex fire kills 400, revolutionaries blame the Shah
September 4, 1978: hundreds of thousands march through Tehran during Eid al-Fitr.
September 8, 1978: Shah declares martial law, and soldiers kill 64 protesters who remain in the streets after curfew.
Nationwide strikes and protests through the remainder of the year. Shah flees in January 1979
Why did repression seem to backfire here? (non-exhausive explanations):
Backlash - repression that’s seen as illegitimate can increase/radicalize support for opposition movements
Signalling - repression is a signal of state weakness.
Substitution - repression targets the most effective mechanisms, so activists do more to sustain the same level of dissent
Diffusion - repression of student activism drove protests to the Mosques, which in turn made them easier to spread
For data on repression events:
Advantages
Global data on conflict events including non-violent protest and police repression
hand-coded using news, government and NGO reports
Disdvantages
short time frame (Africa from 1997, rest of the world mostly post 2010)
tactics and claims are not tracked systematically
messy coding of actors and fatalities
For data on regime types in general:
Primarily expert-coded characteristics of democracy and non-democracy worldwide
Extensive coverage by year on a wide variety of indicators
(can also be downloaded using the vdemdata R package)